In a typical employer-employee relationship, an employer will provide employees with benefits, such as health insurance, retirement plans, 401(k) plans, etc. Many employers will also offer additional benefits to employees, ranging from gym memberships to discounts on products and the like. A fundamental purpose of all such benefits is to strengthen the tie between the employee and his employer. In fact, with the increasingly dynamic job market of today, benefits have become such an important part of the employer-employee relationship that the value of the benefits are estimated to be within 10-40% of a given base salary. As retaining employees and replacing employees who leave becomes increasingly difficult in terms of both the availability of suitable candidates, and in terms of the actual cost of training new employees, employers are trying to maximize the benefits they provide their employees so as to strengthen the employer-employee bond in order to reduce turnover. Nevertheless, given the high administrative and other related costs, minimizing the associated costs has been an elusive goal, particularly considering the lack of economies of scale and efficiencies in the prior art methodologies.
By way of example, inefficiency is inherent in prior art methodologies because in most cases, the employer must arrange or negotiate with a third party for provision of such benefits. Some groups have tried to engineer multi-corporate buying pools. However, these organizations lack information regarding the employee base so that the organizations are not able to offer appropriate benefits at the appropriate time. Given that administration of the corporate human resource function has been traditionally provided in-house, and has been primarily based on paper oriented transactions, it is an increasingly expensive, cumbersome process. To address this problem, more recent prior art solutions over the past decade have tried to replace this type of internal operation with an outsourced, technologically enhanced function which is directed to the administration of benefit plans (e.g., 401(k), pension plans, medical plans, etc.). To this end, strategies have been developed to allow employers to outsource all non-benefit human resource functions themselves (e.g., recruiting, training), however, even the more recent prior art approaches to outsourcing have severe limitations, not the least of which is that they are essentially limited to certain human resource functions, which does not provide for the outsourcing of strategic human resource activities, (e.g., policy, design, development), or business advisory elements which directly add value to employee contribution and organization performance. Moreover, the recent prior art approaches do not maximize the economies of scale, which can be formed in large scale, centralized buying pools.
Furthermore, when employers have generally provided for a systematic administration of traditional benefit plans, they have also provided for non-traditional benefits but have yet to find an efficient approach to administering them. However, the recent popularity of non-traditional benefits (such as discounts from third parties) has added yet further difficulties for integration with the prior art methodologies. This is because all benefits (especially non-traditional benefits) have traditionally been haphazardly administered, with the resulting effect being that many employees do not take advantage of such benefits because they simply do not know about them as employees and are often unaware of certain things such as corporate discounts on goods and services, as well as all other manner of human resource benefits. Moreover, in some cases, they cannot fully appreciate the applicability of the benefits to their personal and professional lives. These shortcomings also stem from the fact that information regarding these benefits is almost never customized to match the needs or interests of each individual employee.